Prince Charles has spoken of the “truly appalling and tragic rate of small farmer suicides in India, stemming in part from the failure of many GM crop varieties.” Britain’s Daily Mail called it “The GM genocide.”

Except linking suicides to GM seeds is simply not true.

“The issue of farmer suicides is not just entirely a farmer issue, or rural issue, or a village issue — it is a much more broader political-economic problem,” said Raju Das, a developmental studies professor at York University.

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While the spotlight is on farmers, forgotten is a suicide crisis among Indians where the suicide rate is twice as high for the general population and even higher for young females.

The issue of farmer suicides first gained media attention in 1995 as the southern state of Maharashtra began reporting a significant rise in farmers killing themselves.

Other states across the country began noticing an increase in farmer suicides as well.

But it wasn’t until seven years later — in 2002 — that the U.S.-based agribusiness Monsanto began selling genetically modified cotton seeds, known as Bt cotton, to Indian farmers. The seeds produce insecticides and led to higher yields, but can be up to 10 times more expensive than regular cotton seeds.

Within years, a narrative began to take shape that farmers were getting into debt to pay for the seed and when they couldn’t repay the money were killing themselves. Another version was that the GM crop failed, leading to debt, leading to suicide.

It is a narrative that is hard to break.

A 2011 report published by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) claimed the sale of expensive genetically modified seeds to rural Indian farmers was a key factor contributing to the growing suicide crisis.

“Multinational agribusiness corporations took advantage of India’s new market globalization … by aggressively promoting the introduction of genetically modified seeds in Indian agriculture,” said the report.

But in 2008, the International Food Policy Research Institute, an alliance of 64 governments, private foundations, and international and regional organizations that aims to end hunger in the developing world, reached an entirely different conclusion.

“It is not only inaccurate, but simply wrong to blame the use of Bt cotton as the primary cause of farmer suicides in India,” said the report, stating that the introduction of Bt cotton in India had actually been effective in producing higher yields and decreasing pesticide usage by nearly 40%.

In 2009, Ron Herring, professor of agrarian political economy at Cornell University, pointed out that many Indian farmers were relying on outdated farming methods and were dependent on the frequently erratic monsoon season.

“The lure of ‘white gold’ is strong,” he wrote. “Without water, cotton fails. In thin red soils without irrigation, the risks are very high. Farmers know this; the alternatives are often worse. Cotton is often the only cash crop that has real potential to change a family’s financial circumstances, but at considerable risk.”

Mr. Das added, “Even now, 60 years after the British left, 70% of India’s farmland depends on the monsoon. That means if the monsoon fails and rains fail, there is drought and the government has not invested enough in water irrigation facilities.”

‘What is striking about this story is that the farmers of India — often branded as peasants in the narrative — have survived so long with such a high level of incompetence’

He said farmers were under many pressures: loss of government subsidies; cheaper foreign imports; the steady privatization of health care; soaring costs of education and an increase in the basic cost of living.

And if Indian farmers found the GM seeds to be uneconomic, then why weren’t they abandoning them, asked Mr. Herring.

“The peasant is constructed as vulnerable to crafty representatives of the market economy, as well as simple and gullible,” wrote Mr. Herring.

“In this narrative, over the last 10 years Indian cotton farmers have not figured out that they have been deceived — or are sufficiently innumerate that they cannot tell profit from loss and therefore do not know whether or not they are being duped.

“What is striking about this story is that the farmers of India — often branded as peasants in the narrative — have survived so long with such a high level of incompetence.”

But suicide within India is a crisis that is rampant across the country.

Prabhat Jha, director of the Center for Global Health Research in Toronto and the co-author of a recent study looking at suicide rates across India, said people killing themselves in the general population were far more troubling, with numbers particularly higher for young Indian women.

“While suicide in farmers is certainly an important phenomena, if we’re concerned about suicide we need to look at the bigger picture,” he said.

“The main story of suicide in India is not of farmers, it is of young people, between the ages of 15 to 29, who are taking their lives. So the dominant headline I think really is, why are so many young Indians killing themselves?”

The number of farmer deaths in India is much less than the general population. According to the report, the rate of suicide deaths among agricultural workers is around seven deaths per 100,000 people, whereas the overall suicide rate in India is close to 15 deaths per 100,000.

And while the number of farm suicides rose sharply between 1995 and 2002, the trend of late has been downward or flat.

“In fact, our study found that the numbers of deaths of men in occupations other than farming was twice as great, meaning there were more deaths in clerical occupations, students, and other occupations than in agricultural work,” he said.

Mr. Herring said the story of farmer suicides and GM seeds was too compelling a story for many people to let go.

“The narrative of Bt-cotton catastrophe in India is coherent and globally distributed; it catches attention and compels action. It is also without any empirical or biological basis,” he wrote.